"Let me tell you what men want.
Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate
behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many
speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake
as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize
their significance. They want to feel important and (be) part of something
important.

Some people believe men are motivated
by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means
to get recognition. they are markers of success, and success makes men
feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in
the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into
three parts: reason, epithymia (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition).
Thymos is what motives the best and worst things men do. It drives them
to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It
drives them to rage if others dont recognize their worth. Sometimes
it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.

Plato went on to point out that people
are not only sensitive about their own self-worth, they are also sensitive
about the dignity of their group, and the dignity of others. If a group
is denied the dignity it deserves, we call that injustice. Thymotic
people mobilize to assert their groups significance if they feel
they are being rendered invisible by society. Thymotic people mobilize
on behalf of those made voiceless by the powerful. As Plato indicated,
thymos is the psychological origin of political action.

If I had the attention of the worlds
politicians for one afternoon, Id lead a discussion on the nature
of the thymotic urge. Id point out that if politicians werent
consumed by a hunger for recognition, none of them would agree to lead
the miserable lives they do. Id point out that in the thymotic
urge, selfishness and selflessness are intertwined. Men compete for
personal glory. By thymos also induces them to sacrifice for causes
larger than themselves.

Id point out that if you see
politics as a competition for recognition, many things become clear.
The economic and literary backwardness of the Arab world has set off
a thymotic crisis, as Arab men lash out to make the world pay attention
to them. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not only a squabble over
land; its intractable because each site wants the other to recognize
its moral superiority. Democracy still has good long-term prospects
in that region because its the only system that meets rising expectations
about individual dignity.

In this country, when workers strike,
theyre not enraged over a few cents an hour. Theyre enraged
because they feel their company is not acknowledging their worth. When
social liberals squabble with social conservatives, each group is trying
to assert the dignity of its own lifestyle.

The partisanship in Washington is
a thymotic contest on stilts. The Bush administration goes out of its
way to show how little it respects the Democratic opposition. The history
of the Democratic Party over the last five years is the history of a
party trying every more furiously to assert its dignity. Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld are extremely thymotic men. President Bush is a
thymotic man partially chastened by Christianity. Democratic activists
have increasingly spurned measured, reasonable men for aggressive, thymotic
ones: Howard Dean, James Carville and the post-2000 Al Gore.

If I had those politicians for an
afternoon, Id point out that even though the thymotic urge drives
so much of public life, we really dont talk about thymos anymore.
Id add that when you read the ancient political philosophers on
thymos, they treat it as a male trait. But over the past century women
have been expressing their thymotic urges more and more; and people
over 40 have a complex about female thymos that people under 40 generally
dont have.

Id ask them to read Harvey Mansfields
new book, Manliness, which is two books in one. First, its
a subtle exploration about the virtues and vices of the thymotic urge.
its also a series of troublemaking generalizations about the differences
between men and women.

Over the next few weeks, Mansfield
and his feminist critics are going to brawl - thymotically - over his
assertions. Im not as impressed by Mansfields generalizations
as he is, but hell have one advantage: He understands the nature
of thymos, which shapes this fight, and so much of our political life."

The Greeks had
a word for it: Thymos - the hunger for recognition - explains a lot
about politics and about human nature by David Brooks, New York
Times. Published in Star Tribune, March 25, 2006